Citations and the Zipf-Mandelbrot's law

TL;DR

This paper observes that scientific citation ranks follow Zipf-Mandelbrot's law, suggesting that citation patterns are more stochastic than previously thought, as supported by simple random citation models.

Contribution

It highlights the prevalence of Zipf-Mandelbrot's law in citation data and challenges assumptions about the complexity of citation processes.

Findings

Citation ranks follow Zipf-Mandelbrot's law.

Simple random models replicate the power-law behavior.

Citation processes may be more stochastic than complex.

Abstract

A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so much the peculiar character of the underlying (complex) process, but more likely, than it is usually assumed, its more stochastic nature.